Adobe Systems 7 April 2009
This document accompanies the release of Digital Editions 1.7.1. This release consists essentially of the removal of one now-obsolete feature and some bug fixes.
The feature that has been removed is that Digital Editions no longer supports fulfillment from Adobe Content Server 3-powered sites. Adobe Content Server 3 is now obsolete, having been replaced by Adobe Content Server 4.
As of March 30, 2009 Adobe de-activated the support in the Adobe Content Server 3 activation server such that no new instances of Acrobat or Reader could be activated. Existing instances of Acrobat and Reader that had already been activated will continue to work and can still fulfill content from any website still providing Adobe Content Server 3 content.
With this release, Digital Editions will no longer fulfill content from sites powered by Adobe Content Server 3 (though few are left at this time). Digital Editions is still able to migrate existing Adobe Content Server 3-licensed eBooks to the new Adobe Content Server 4 license format. Such migration will be supported until mid-December 2009. After that no more migrations will be possible.
Features in this release
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A bug has been fixed that caused users behind non-authenticated proxies to have to download and use the standalone installer. Authenticated proxies, though, are still not supported. Adobe is investigating solutions to providing this support. For more information, please see "Adobe Digital Editions installation fails in some proxy server networks" (TechNote kb408439).
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In addition to installation via the seamless-download installer previously supported, Digital Editions can also be installed using a standalone installer. The standalone installer is documented in the Digital Editions 1.7 Standalone Installation Instructions. To get the installer, documentation and other information about Digital Editions and related products, please visit the Digital Publishing section of Adobe Developer Connection site.
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Digital Editions continues to support the Sony Reader, both the PRS-505A and the new PRS-700. Users of the original PRS-505 need to upgrade their firmware by visiting the PRS-505 Software Updates and Drivers. They also MUST download the latest version of the Sony Ebook Library and run the installer. If they do not do this, Digital Editions will not be able recognize the PRS-505. Note that support for the Sony Reader is available only on Windows.
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Digital Editions 1.7 continues to support named-authorization with an Adobe ID. Adobe strongly urges all users to take advantage of this feature. Users who decline to authorize their computers with their Adobe ID can always take advantage of this feature at any time by selecting "Authorize This Computer" from the Reading or Library menus.
To find out why this is so important, please visit the Digital Editions FAQ page and read the section on "Content Portability."
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This release includes a fix for a potential security vulnerability when rendering JBIG2 image files.
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This release also includes a fix for print resolution on the Mac. Previous versions were reverting to 72 DPI irrespective of what the eBook allowed. The new version allows printing to the maximum resolution the permissions allow or 300 DPI, whichever is less.
Known issues with this release
1. Users with lowered privileges (non-administrators) on Windows Vista machines may encounter problems when fulfilling content with Digital Editions. This is due to the enhanced security features found in Vista. The workaround is
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Open the Control Panel.
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If you are in Classic view, click Control Panel Home on the left sidebar.
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In the Search box, type user account.
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Click Turn User Account Control (UAC) On or Off.
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Click Continue.
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Deselect the Use User Account Control (UAC) to Help Protect Your Computer option and then click OK.
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When prompted, choose whether you want to restart the computer now or later.
Note: UAC is a Windows security feature. You should only disable this if you are sure your system is otherwise secure.
2. On Windows, if and only if the user installed Digital Editions 1.7 (the previous release to this one) in a non-default location, the 1.7.1 installer will not remove the previous version (i.e. 1.7). If the user accepted the default location of Digital Editions, then the 1.7.1 installer will automatically remove the older version. But if the previous install wasn't to the default location, then the user will have to manually delete the older version.
3. Users cannot fulfill eBooks successfully using the Opera browser. Instead of passing the ACSM file to Digital Editions, Opera by default opens the file. This can be avoided by the following:
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Open Opera Preferences dialog.
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On the Advanced tab, click Downloads.
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Click Add.
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Set the mimetype to application/vnd.adobe.adept+xml.
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Set the file extension to acsm.
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Press OK to close the dialog.
4. Portuguese support. Digital Editions 1.7 supports Brazilian Portuguese, not European Portuguese. The differences are not large, but Adobe is aware they are not the same. We will support both in a future release but in the current release we have mapped European Portuguese locales into Brazilian Portuguese so the correct language is displayed. However, there are some cases where the user may have to make minor settings at the OS level to get the right result.
If customers find other issues between the two variants of Portuguese, please let us know.
5. Safari has been designed to protect users from unsafe files and plugins. While files known by Safari to be safer are automatically opened, the acsm files that Digital Editions uses are not known by Safari, which will download the files but not launch them. To override this you must specifically tell Safari that acsm files are "safe" by creating/modifying your Mac's com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist file. For a discussion of this well known Safari issue see the following blog posts:
Users may encounter similar issues with other browsers, depending on their security settings.
6. Installing Digital Editions 1.7.1 on a Mac does NOT uninstall the old version. In order to uninstall the old version, you must uninstall manually. This is described in "Installing Digital Editions 1.7 on Mac OS does not uninstall Digital Editions 1.6" (TechNote kb408375).
7. Digital Editions does not at this time, support JPEG2000. It does support JPEG, GIF and PNG images. Support for JPEG2000 will be added in a subsequent release.
8. Sometimes, on Macintosh Intel computers, when the "End User License Agreement" (EULA) is presented to the user, it does not have the focus. The EULA is even sometimes hidden behind the browser. This latter behavior has also been reported occasionally for Vista. The only workaround is to manually bring the dialog to the front (if hidden) and click on the window of the dialog.